The Southend Siren

Artwork created for Southend City Jam 2023

Sligo native FRIZ is a visual artist based in Bangor, Co. Down. She did a one year PLC course in Art and Design in Sligo, after which she went on to study Classical Animation in Ballyfermot College in Dublin. She lived in Edinburgh for a few years after that and did the 2nd year of an Illustration course in Telford College.

When she moved to Belfast in 2008 she did a Street Art Masterclass course through the Urban Arts Academy in the Waterfront. That was where she first dipped her toe into doing mural work. She mainly learned to spray paint from other artists sharing their knowledge and techniques with her.

Friz is short for ‘Frizelle’, a name she’d been using for a long time. She saw it written on a headstone in the graveyard where WB Yeats is buried. It sounds macabre but she spent a lot of time there as a child, it’s a tourist spot and she grew up close by. The headstone actually says ‘Frizzelle’ ( double z) but she had remembered it wrong when she started using the name.

She works in both digital and traditional mediums, using a combination of aerosols and acrylics depending on the surface she is using at the time.

Her work explores history, myths and the folklore that shapes the cultural identity of a place. Using these stories to create a journey of discovery for people as they reconnect with some of their earliest and formative memories. The medium of murals allow these stories to be presented as part of the fabric of a place to new generations and told in a contemporary way.

Her work leans towards presenting powerful female characters and explores our connection with the natural world.

Sometimes it is a mirror, sometimes an aspiration.

Friz’s work has been showcased in Ireland, UK, Colombia, Poland, France, Mexico and Turkey.